


puppeteered by fear of what you want the most

by glitterforplaster (ineffableangel)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Plantbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2554001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineffableangel/pseuds/glitterforplaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam— Cabeswater— <em>Adam</em> was both insolvent and bank, both lightning rod and rainstorm. He lent Cabeswater his soul, and in return it fed him power, magic, electric alive. He was static, he was wiring, he was sunlight and beekeeper and seer. He <em>was</em> the ley line. Funny, that he had spent so long running from Gansey’s sweet hands and suffocating birthright, determined not to be another of his things, and here he was, belonging to something none of them could control. Funny. <em>Coincidence.</em></p><p>(contains spoilers for the raven boys)</p>
            </blockquote>





	puppeteered by fear of what you want the most

**Author's Note:**

> technically this is gen but there are hints of gansey/adam/ronan, because it's me. title from kat sinclair's "the host;" _you feel like a parasite, your body's the host, puppeteered by fear of what you want the most._ warnings for body horror and mention of child abuse as per canon.
> 
> i love it when my faves slowly but noticeably become inhuman.

Cabeswater was a virus. It craved Adam desperately, completely, and like ivy it unfurled its leaves in the hollow of his throat, the spaces between his ribs, beneath his tongue and between his toes, shifting and curling in his belly; it made a poison home of a poison boy. There wasn’t a single moment Adam could not feel it. The forest haunted him when he walked, when he spoke, while he slept. It was never as strong as while he slept.

Cabeswater crept inside parts of Adam he had not touched in years, parts as dark as pitch, parts he had made himself forget. It cracked him open one searchlight prayer at a time, wrenched him apart and remade him, and when it had finished every stitch glowed. He had offered himself up fully, all-encompassingly, no returns. _I will be your hands, I will be your eyes, I will be yours, I will be you._ Some days Adam could hardly tell what was human and what was forest. It was becoming more and more difficult to disentangle the two. _I will be you. We will be each other._ They wondered if their friends had noticed.

Adam— Cabeswater— _Adam_ was both insolvent and bank, both lightning rod and rainstorm. He lent Cabeswater his soul, and in return it fed him power, magic, electric alive. He was static, he was wiring, he was sunlight and beekeeper and seer. He _was_ the ley line. Funny, that he had spent so long running from Gansey’s sweet hands and suffocating birthright, determined not to be another of his things, and here he was, belonging to something none of them could control. Funny. _Coincidence._

For all their blood-promise of a covenant, it seemed that Cabeswater took more ground than Adam voluntarily gave. There were cracks in Adam that Cabeswater could not fill, words in him it could not pronounce, but he was only a boy, and it was a kingdom, a religion, a force. Some day soon it would swallow him. He could push it out, at least theoretically, draw the line in the sand and declare himself sovereign, but it was becoming harder and harder to remember why he should, why he would want to. It made him feel as though he could not hurt, could not die, as long as the protection of the forest hung over him. It made him feel holy.

This, though, he had not agreed to.

Noah was the first to see it.

They had congregated at Nino’s, waiting for Blue’s shift to end. She was wearing a startlingly blue skirt beneath her apron, almost cobalt, patterned with yellow stars she had obviously cut from another article of clothing and sewn on herself. The stars were placed rather haphazardly, and one of them, near the hem, looked about ready to jump ship, quite literally hanging by a thread. Adam enjoyed this skirt greatly, and used it to keep track of her as she wove her way through the pizza parlor. Gansey and Ronan were absorbed in a heated argument Adam was only half-hearing, something about a movie he hadn’t seen. Whenever Blue passed their table, both of them stopped abruptly, Gansey to ask how she was, Ronan to shoot her an exasperated glance which she would immediately return, as if they were sharing some private joke.

“ _Ronan_ ,” said Gansey, sounding as though the world would end if he couldn’t get his point across, “ _Anastasia_ is historically inaccurate.”

“ _Gansey_ ,” said Ronan, sounding as though the world had already ended, and he was short a best friend, “ _Anastasia_ has green smoke dragons and a talking bat and it’s a _musical_ , and you’re worried about historical inaccuracy.”

Blue passed their table again, balancing two plates of half-eaten pizza crust on each arm and blowing her fringe out of her eyes. The yellow star at her hem quivered mutinously. “Are you guys still on this? Gansey, stuff your Welsh king pretension where the sun don’t shine and watch the movie. It’s a cinematic masterpiece.”

“Thank you!” Ronan shouted, and held up his hand for a high five. Blue considered it for a moment, then carefully extracted her pinky finger from the pile of dishes and touched it to Ronan’s palm. Ronan’s lip curled. “Oh, come on, Sargent, you can do better than that! Where’s your passion?”

“How’s this?” Blue kicked him in the shin. Gansey covered his laugh with a cough. A precarious plate wobbled on the inside of Blue’s elbow, and Adam’s hand shot out to steady it the moment before it fell. Blue flashed him a smile.

“Cosmically unsatisfying, thanks, but I’ll take it,” Ronan said, leaning back in his seat. “You can go back to work now.”

Blue made a very Blue-like sound, halfway between a snort and a huff. “Now I know what you really value me for.”

“Stirring up trouble with me!” Ronan called after her. Her skirt crinkled like tissue paper as she walked away, stars flowing and fluxing. “You’re my partner in crime! Let’s go murder a motherfucker, princess! Your prissy college counselor, maybe? You, me, a bottle of a wine, a machete, the woods— It’ll be a bonding experience!”

“Ronan, lower your voice, this is a family venue,” Gansey said, but his mouth was infinitely amused. "People are staring."

“Let them stare,” Ronan said, once again viper-pleased. He loved nothing more than causing a scene, especially when Blue allowed him to pull her into it, even from afar.

“You are such a bad influence,” Gansey tutted. He was like a hen, Adam thought. A hen with unhealthily singular purpose and an encyclopedic knowledge of fifteenth century Welsh monarchy. “Stop corrupting our poor Jane.”

Ronan opened his mouth, ostensibly to say something else, or possibly to spit fondly in Gansey’s pizza, but instead he only shivered, shoulders jerking. Gansey and Adam shivered, too. The temperature around their booth had plummeted. Icy fingers walked their spines. In the shifting light, the three of them looked less like the rich Virginia school boys they pretended to be, and more like the wild, hungry creatures they were.

“Noah,” said Adam. It was not a question, but he said it under his breath, hushed and hurried.

“Adam,” said Noah. They couldn’t see him— Blue was too far for that, had no idea he was here, had not offered any semblance of energy for him to materialise— but his breath was arctic on the nape of Adam’s neck. “Have you been home recently?”

Adam knew Noah didn’t mean Saint Agnes. “No. Not since... no.”

“Then what,” said Noah, tipping Adam’s head back, “is this?”

Adam couldn’t see what they were looking at, but Ronan and Gansey went perfectly still. Ronan breathed a soft, “ _Fuck_ , Parrish,” and Gansey reached out a shaky hand to trace the juncture of Adam’s shoulder and throat, where he’d had a persistent itch all day. Adam flinched. He felt like he’d just licked a battery, or touched a live wire, raw, jolting, tingling down to his toes.

“What is it?” he asked, voice suddenly hoarse. “What’s wrong?”

“Ronan, go find Blue,” Gansey said, carefully flat, but he'd already given himself away. He wouldn't call Blue by her actual name if he wasn't serious. “Tell her we’ve got to skip out early. Adam, zip up your jacket. To your neck. Don't let anyone see.”

Ronan stood up. Adam watched him walk toward the counter, as silent and swift as a bird of prey, seeming to pull in all the florescent light, leaving their table shadowed and inconspicuous.

“What’s wrong?” Adam repeated, senselessly.

“We’re going back to Monmouth now.” Gansey said, herding Adam from the booth and then through Nino’s front door, like a shepherd herding a spooked lamb. “You’ll be okay.”

Gansey unlocked the Pig just as Ronan reappeared, shrugging on his coat and sliding into the passenger’s seat. He wouldn’t stop jiggling his leg. Gansey turned the ignition once, twice, cursed as wickedly as a Gansey could curse, turned it a third time. It stuck, and they drove away from Nino’s and from Blue. Adam, sitting in the back, craned his neck to see his reflection in the rearview mirror; the same brown hair, the same incessant constellation of freckles, the same blue eyes. He could see nothing that might cause worldwide panic.

“Sorry.”

Adam turned. Noah was sitting beside him, resting his chin on Adam’s shoulder, though he couldn’t feel it. Noah smiled; it was made of storm clouds. “We’re the same, now,” he said. “You’re more me than me, really. It favors you... likes you. You came willingly. You make a better champion than a dead boy. Sorry.” Noah closed his eyes, seemed to go to sleep, leaning there against Adam, but then the Camaro hit a bump in the road, and he bled into the shadows entirely.

“It’ll be nice,” Noah whispered, intangible and invisible once more, “to have a friend again.”

The Camaro careened over another pothole, and Noah was gone.

“Um,” Adam said, soft, trying to tamp down his alarm. “Y’all better tell me what’s wrong right now or I’m gonna assume the worst, because Noah is scaring me back here. Am I sick? Am I dying?”

“No,” Ronan said, as they pulled up to Monmouth Manufacturing. “You’re flowering.”

“Huh?”

“You’re _flowering_ , Parrish. Sprouting. Budding. You are growing a fucking garden from the inside out. We’re here— Go find a mirror.”

Adam found a mirror.

Black and blue flowers had broken through the skin of his shoulder, twisting and opening along the curve of his neck. It was easy to see how Noah had mistaken them for bruises in Nino’s; they reminded Adam of a funeral bouquet. He tugged off his shirt, pulse hammering, wondering how much of him had changed since this morning. His t-shirt caught in several places, then pooled on Gansey’s bathroom floor with a soft rustle. The flowers spread from their perch on his shoulder to his navel, multicolored and inhuman, curving from his stomach. A red poppy unfurled, there, where a cigarette burn was only yesterday; a swirl of orange marigolds wound his ribcage to cover the raised white scratches he knew so well; chains of daisies along his back chased the harsh zigzag memories of his father's belt. When he pushed them aside with his thumb, he could see no cuts or gashes. They hadn’t forced their way to the light, but grown from him, as naturally as his nails. They were part of him. _You’re growing a garden from the inside out._

There were cracks in Adam that Cabeswater could not fill, words in him it could not pronounce, but he was only a boy, and it was a kingdom, a religion, a force. Today, it had swallowed him.

Adam put his shirt back on, turned off the light, and shut the bathroom door behind him. His hands trembled, but he was no longer afraid. He found Gansey and Ronan in Ronan’s bedroom, heads bent together, whispering furiously. _There's got to be something in the books **—** There's nothing in the fucking books! Didn't you see it?_ Adam coughed politely, and they sprung apart.

“I think it’s trying to fix me,” he said, after a shuddered breath. “Cabeswater. It got inside my head, my heart... it's only fitting that it found its way outside of me, too. The flowers— they’re only growing over my scars.” He messed with a loose thread on his sleeve, trying not to meet anyone's eyes.

"What does a tree do when you cut away a dead branch?” Ronan asked, and Adam breathed a sigh of relief that he understood.

“It grows back a healthier one,” Gansey supplied, low and dangerous. "Is this a good thing?”

Adam shrugged; petals dragged beneath his shirt. “It _feels_ good,” he said. “Feels like recompense. Like healing.”

Gansey threw up his hands. "You can't just walk around with plants growing out of you. Someone will notice."

"I'll learn to control it. I think I'm meant to."

"This wasn't part of your deal." So he was serious again; Gansey never brought that up, never acknowledged it directly, refused to remember how Adam had betrayed him. The sacrifice was a subject banished from all mouths within a ten mile radius of the Gansey-Czerny-Lynch household. "You didn't promise this. Hands, yes, eyes, yes, but not all of you. I don't want to lose you to Cabeswater, Adam." It sounded like the confession of a sin, though this was no church, and these lonely boys no instruments of Heaven. "I want to find Glendower, desperately, you know that, but, oh, God, not... not without you."

"It's too much," Ronan said. He had been largely quiet, but now he lifted his chin to meet Adam's watchful gaze. His eyes burned like a Molotov cocktail. "I know how tempting it can be to let go, to drown in it, but it's too much to hand over. Gansey's right. You won't get enough in return."

"No," Adam said. "No, you don't get it— This isn't another thing I'm giving up. Cabeswater... I think it cares about me, or at least it needs me whole, and I've always been in pieces. Aglionby, my parents, you and Noah and Blue and the quest, it's all compartmentalized so that one never touches another. I've tried so hard to keep all my sides separate that I've never had the chance to be me, all of me, always. I've been torn apart for so long. Now Cabeswater is sewing me back together."

Adam's heart pounded. A nameless flower the color of seastone bloomed from his wrist, curling comforting, as if sped on by his anxieties. He didn't like to admit that he was wounded, not to his friends, not to anyone, but he was, visibly, undeniably, and that was all. _Train wreck,_ said Calla. _Worthless, useless, powerless, coward, silly little boy, piece of shit, never amount to anything, wish you'd never been born,_ said his father.

 _Beautiful_ , said Cabeswater, singing it out through his bones like a hymn. _Redeemable. Not broken, only interrupted._

Some days Adam could hardly tell what was human and what was forest, because there was no longer a difference. _I will be your hands, I will be your eyes, I will be yours, I will be you._ He belonged to the ley line, and the ley line belonged to him; they bent and swayed as one. He was static, he was wiring, he was sunlight and beekeeper and seer and _magician_ and now he was an extension of the trees. Cabeswater gave him power. Cabeswater gave him purpose.

For the first time in his life, Adam Parrish felt _wanted_.

"I promised something," he began, softly. He wasn't looking at Gansey anymore, but at the glittering sky through Ronan's window. At any moment, one of those lights could fall as he was falling, and he prayed some force would catch it as he had been caught. He felt inhuman and violently alive. He wondered if Ronan ever dreamed about him; he wondered if he could drag down a handful of stars for Blue's skirt.

A flower opened. A poison boy became his own antidote.

"I promised something," Adam said again. "And I've kept that promise. This is my reward."

 

**Author's Note:**

> [i make all that i believe.](http://icarus.co.vu/tagged/i-make-all-that-i-believe)


End file.
